We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.
Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.
What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.
That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.
The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.
The idea that we could get the majority of the industry to agree on ethics is pretty far-fetched when a large portion think surveillance is making their country safe.
For instance, I find a user control that prevents the user from changing focus whenever the input is invalid to be unethical, or at least severely impolite. It's the equivalent of grabbing someone's face while you're talking to them. Me: "The control you propose is hostile to the user." Customer: "Do it the way we want, or your company loses the contract."
As it turns out, the customer would love to grab someone's face, not just while they talk, but also as they yell, with a light rain of spittle falling gently onto the target's visage. That's because they assume everyone is a complete idiot, whose only salvation is absolute obedience to those officially certified as more capable. They fervently believe that you can order someone to not make mistakes. So it should be no surprise that my ethical objection was meaningless to them.
The people paying for software and hardware enabling Panopticon-style universal surveillance have a completely alien system of ethics, and more than enough money to ignore your personal morality. There will always be someone around in desperate enough financial straits that they will quash their own opinions and take the paycheck.
A cartel enforcer for software workers is the only way to significantly slow down technologies (you can't actually stop progress) that the majority of those workers find to be unethical. That enforcer has to be able to tell its members that they cannot do such work, no matter how well it pays, because otherwise, the buyers, for whom budget size is no obstacle, simply pay the higher price to those who need cash now more than self-respect later.
As long as there are mouths to feed and rent to be paid, the guy with deep pockets will be able to pay another to do his dirty work.
It isn't the ethical training that makes the difference in medicine, but the ethical enforcement. Doctors and lawyers can be decertified by their peers and elders, such that they cannot be rehired as a member of that profession. That means that an employer cannot demand unethical behavior, unless it is willing to compensate to the tune of all the money those people could theoretically make over all the remaining years of their careers.
I would hope that enough software workers could agree that it is unethical to casually collect and retain information from anyone without their fully informed consent, which is diligently confirmed, and revocable on demand. I further hope that we could agree that it is unethical to gather information to support any criminal investigation without reasonable suspicion that the target has actually committed a crime. Those people who believe that adding more hay to the stack makes the needles easier to find can form their own cartel.
I happen to believe that ethically-limited surveillance is more efficient and effective than the heavy-handed dragnet approach. I also think it is unethical to use an O(N^3) brute-force algorithm when an O(N log N) alternative is available. But most customers only care whether something works, and is delivered on time and under budget. They won't ever care about our opinions regarding quality, ethics, or best practices until after we are capable of making them pay dearly for not caring.
“How do you know the chosen ones? ‘No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for his brother.’ Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame. For one person. In the dark, where no one will ever know, or see.”
— Babylon 5, Season 2, episode 21, Comes the Inquisitor, 1995
"The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." --Thomas Jefferson, to James Madison, Sep 6, 1789
For all the influence exerted by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., they effected change with their lives, and not their deaths. One should not choose to die for a cause, or against one. Rather, live for your own principles, and teach them to those others who wish to learn. Those who sacrifice themselves, expecting no reward, grow no greater in my eyes. They become memory, and immediately begin to fade, except to the extent that they are renewed by those who still live.
What manner of scoundrel would I be to suggest that another to sacrifice for my benefit, that I may treasure the memory of it? What sort of fool would assent? That is the mentality of the beehive, where the workers die to protect their queen. In a society of equals, for anyone to die unnecessarily is a tragedy. For someone to choose to die, it is a horror.
Attributing some nobility to self-sacrifice is an ethic for hierarchies, to convince the lesser people, against their own interests, to hurtle headstrong into situations where they may be killed. It makes pawns of people who might otherwise be greater. It is not fitting to convince anyone to believe they are so unworthy that the best way they might serve others is by throwing themselves into fires that need never have been lit.
I would argue the most important changes they affected were for themselves. You don't risk your health by helping someone who gets attacked to earn their gratitude, but to be able to look in the mirror. That's the only thing that gives enough energy to sustain certain things for years and decades. And Rosa Parks for example didn't plan to end segregation, she was sick of putting up with it. Nothing more, nothing less. How great other people are in your eyes is does not matter for what value their own acts of moral hygiene have to them, and people don't need "expect" a reward for such things because the deed itself IS the reward. They already have it. And since you brought up MLK:
I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you aren't willing to die for it then you aren't fit to live.
[..]
You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOjpaIO2seY&t=18m26s
> In a society of equals, for anyone to die unnecessarily is a tragedy. For someone to choose to die, it is a horror.
Here's a secret: everybody dies, either way. The only choice you have is how you live. From John J. Chapman's commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College, 1900:
If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
> It is not fitting to convince anyone to believe they are so unworthy that the best way they might serve others is by throwing themselves into fires that need never have been lit.
People who are great don't need to be convinced of anything. People who aren't are impossible to convince. And it's not "fitting" to justify stoking fires because otherwise others would do it, either. Then let those others do it? And hey, for all you know, they all might be doing it because otherwise you would do it.
And who is actually sacrificing? People who aren't sacrificing their ideals and their morals, or people who sacrifice them for some food and a few decades more?
Just because I mentioned specific individuals does not mean that I agree with them. I only acknowledge that they produced an effect that propagated beyond their own deaths through the actions of the devotees they acquired while living. I might also have mentioned prophets of various religions, though I may not follow any of them.
Skilled as I am at seeing the fnords, in the MLK address you quoted, under the obvious text, lies this subtext: Is my cause not great enough that you might be willing to die for it? If you are not, and have no greater cause to hold your loyalty, then you are more a walking corpse than a living man, and unworthy of my regard. It is very similar to "Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." It is a recruiting speech. And every time a young black person gets "the talk", it is contradicted. According to MLK, every time black kids submerge their will in a police encounter, and come away from it alive, but humiliated, they will be dead inside until their bodies finally catch up. According to me, they will live long enough to either vote in comprehensive reform or to organize and rebel from a dearth of it.
Nonviolent resistance depends in whole upon the oppressors' general unwillingness to murder nonviolent protesters. Willingness to die only works insofar as the opposition is unwilling to kill. Gandhi's protests worked only because British forces in India were unwilling to massacre Indians wholesale. MLK's protests worked only because the segregationists were unwilling to kill in public, before the typewriters and cameras of nationally-published journalists.
If you are willing to die, and the other is willing to kill you, you would be prudent to arrange your affairs in advance, such that other people are positioned to impose meaningful consequences as a result. Otherwise, you are gifting your enemy with a tiny victory.
If you quit a job in the military-industrial complex for which you have some ethical concerns, such as one which enables dragnet surveillance, what is the meaningful consequence? Every failing of the project in recent months is scapegoated to you. The contractor hires a replacement butt-in-seat. The work goes on. Your sacrifice yields nothing. No one rises in gratitude to pay your bills. When you mention in job interviews that you left due to ethical conflicts with the former employer, you never seem to be a good "cultural fit".
Why then would anyone choose to do that?
I'll take the food and the decades. I won't go willingly to my grave, if doing so wouldn't be more meaningful than what I believe I could accomplish with the entire remainder of my natural life. Sometimes, you can't avoid it, but you should always try to not die as you work towards your goals. Don't fear death, but don't ask it out on romantic dates, either.